Man Drowning

by Henry Kuttner

  …The Count’s door was closed. Mrs. De Anza’s door was open, directly across from it, and everything was tumbled around inside, the bureau drawers hanging half out, some clothes on the floor. I went in without making a noise. The light from the hall was enough. Anyway, I didn’t dare turn on the bedroom light. De Anza might have seen it under the crack of his door. As it was, I sweated while I searched.

  I had no luck. It was a relief when I gave up. But now I’d started out, I had some momentum to carry me. I hadn’t thought for a minute before I got the idea of trying Callahan’s desk. I don’t know why, unless it was that I’d found some of De Anza’s special cigarettes in that desk the other day.

  Something made me sure, from the start, that Callahan would have got the safe’s combination if he could, that he’d have followed pretty much the same path I was following. You couldn’t avoid it, with the De Anzas. But I had a queer little shock when I bent open an empty match folder with one match left in it and saw some letters and numbers written inside. I thought it was almost too good to be true. I wondered why I didn’t feel happier about finding the thing. It seemed to me that I’d been almost hoping Callahan hadn’t got the same idea. But he had. Maybe the De Anzas never hired really normal people.

  Normal? I was a damn sight more normal than that impotent bastard and his crazy wife.

  I sat there at the desk looking at the numbers on the match folder and wondering why Callahan hadn’t used them. Or maybe he had. He’d certainly left the ranch fast enough. Suppose he had used it? Then the De Anzas would have changed the combination of the safe. Maybe this thing wasn’t any good after all. Maybe it wasn’t the combination. But I didn’t know what else would say L 23 R 15 L 25.

  Somehow I was afraid to make the next move.

  But I had to. Every minute I wasted, Sherry might hear from McElroy. And he’d give her a big build-up, that was certain. She’d be convinced I was a homicidal maniac. For all I knew, the police might he heading out for the ranch right now, on the chance that they’d found Gavotte’s killer. I couldn’t wait. I had to move. I don’t think I wanted to use that combination, but there wasn’t a thing else in the world I could do, by then. So I’d take the money and get out of town with Sherry. A clean break. We’d start fresh, after that. Somehow. Changing our names, going somewhere—Mexico, maybe. All I wanted was this one break. And the only breaks you ever get you make for yourself. I knew that, now.

  The match folder had one match left in it, and I tore that out. I scratched it alight. I held it in front of my face, watching it burn, turning it so it wouldn’t go out. The yellow flame came up spade-shaped, with a little ghost of blue around it. It burned toward my fingers, the match turning black and curling behind it, except for a little band of orange-red that slowly followed the flame.

  I blew out the match.

  Then it was all right. A little smoke curled up. I put the match in an ash tray on the desk. I felt easy now, settled about what I was going to do. Somehow, the match had made a difference.

  With the match folder in my pocket, I went back to the living room. And I went ahead of myself, watching while in my mind I pulled back the carpet, opened the safe, took out the seven thousand bucks, and went out to the garage where the Chewy was. Sherry wouldn’t have heard from McElroy yet. When the odds start turning in your favor, they keep on. I had a break now. All I had to do was ride it. And not let anything get in the way. Now I was in a hurry.

  In the door of the living room I stopped. Benita was in there cleaning up. She fiddled with a Venetian blind, she picked up a used glass, she rubbed dust off the piano, and now and then she looked at me. Did she know where I’d just been?

  I thought, Well, if she does, this is it. I’m going to have that dough. I’m going to have Sherry.

  But then I decided there was an easier answer to why Benita kept glancing my way. I was all revved up, and it must have showed in my face, in the way I stood, even. I tried to relax. I tried on a smile when Benita went past me to the hall broom closet.

  She was moving as slow as the hour hand of a clock. She had all the time in the world. But time was running out on me. I knew I couldn’t wait until she swept up, or mopped, or whatever. I had to get to Sherry.

  She stepped inside the closet, and I moved almost without thinking. I shut the door on her. I turned the key in the lock. Then I stood looking at the blank panels, wondering if I’d really done it. The first step, I thought. After this I can’t go back. I’ve made the first move and it leads right on to the last. But I didn’t know what the last would be. Only, now there was no time to waste. I had to start moving fast.

  I hadn’t taken three steps before Benita yelled. It wasn’t so loud, from inside the closet, but just the same my breath stopped. I was back at the closet in one jump. I slammed the heel of my hand against the door; not too hard, but hard enough. She didn’t scream again. But now I couldn’t be sure of anything. I stood there silently, sweating, waiting, listening. If the Count had been asleep, I was sure Nita’s voice wouldn’t have carried to his bedroom loud enough to wake him up. The house was well built. But if he was awake, he could have heard. And I kept expecting her to yell again.

  There was a row of knives in a rack on the kitchen wall. I went in, got a long butcher’s blade, and holding it in my left hand, I unlocked the closet with my right. When I opened the door, Benita was trying to push herself back through the wall, as though she’d just jumped back away from the door. Her black eyes were big and staring. They flickered down to the knife, back at me, and her mouth opened again.

  I frowned at her, put my finger to my lips, and shook my head. I showed her the knife. I didn’t know enough Spanish to tell her to keep quiet, so I let the knife do the talking. She understood, all right. Which was just as well. Because showing her the knife was one thing, but using it was another. I just wanted to make sure she wouldn’t yell again, and scaring the crap out of her was the only way.

  She kept staring at me as I shut the door again, but her lips were pressed together hard. I turned the key, put the knife back where it belonged, and listened again. There was no sound. And by now something would have happened, if De Anza had heard Nita yell.

  Okay. The track was clear. But I had less time than I’d hoped. And what about the phone?

  In the living room, I bent down to yank the telephone wires loose from the box. I’d need all the time I could get. But with seven thousand dollars in my pocket and Sherry along, I’d take my chances. The Mexican border isn’t too far from Phoenix. Sherry—I’d have to think of a good story to explain why we were going to Chicago the long way round. But—not now, not yet. The money first.

  By then I was at the safe, the rug kicked aside, the metal plate slid back. The open match folder was in my hand, and I was being very careful about turning the dial. Left to twenty-three. Right to fifteen. Left to twenty-five…

  I’d missed it.

  Easy. Not too fast. You can’t hurry a safe. It has to be precision work, right on each calibration. Left to twenty-three. Right—

  “It won’t work,” De Anza said.

  —to fifteen. Eactly fifteen. Exactly.

  I watched my fingers stop on the dial. I looked down at them. Then I turned my head slowly. He was standing inside the hall door, wearing pajamas and a dressing gown, his left hand hanging, his right hand holding that silver-mounted revolver of his aimed right at me. He didn’t have his dark glasses on. There wasn’t a thing wrong with his eyes. Not a thing. They were just gray and empty. They were a million miles away.

  My left hand held the empty match folder. I closed my fingers, crushing the pasteboard, rolling and wadding it up as tight and hard as I could.

  “What?” I said.

  He watched me as though I weren’t even human.

  “I said it won’t work. We had the combination changed after Callahan left…Get up.”

  I stood up slowly. The match folder was crushed inside my hand, as tight a pellet
as I could make it. I lifted my hands over my head. De Anza, watching me, moved side-wise toward the phone. Thank God I’d pulled the wires loose.

  I let him lift the receiver before I moved. Then I moved fast. My left hand shot that pasteboard pellet at his face, and maybe the sweat from my palm had glued it together, because it didn’t open up in midair. It didn’t even hit him. It wouldn’t have hurt him if it had. But that wasn’t the idea. He’d jerked aside, he hadn’t squeezed the trigger, and that half-second was all I wanted. I’d learned this kind of fighting the hard way. Get in the first shot. Rattle the enemy enough so his bullet goes wild. The first shot’s the important one—even if you don’t have a gun.

  I didn’t even have to think. My body knew what to do. My arm swung down and knocked his sidewise, so the revolver had to point somewhere else. It was easy, quick and easy. Maybe he’d been tough once, but that was a long time ago. I swung my hip sidewise so he couldn’t knee me, and then I had one hand for each of his hands, and he couldn’t do a thing. He tried. He did his damnedest to point that revolver at me. But my wrist was stronger. I turned it, little by little, till it pointed at him instead. His finger was still on the trigger, but now if he kept on fighting, he was really running a risk.

  “Open the safe,” I said.

  But he still thought he could stay on top. His face smoothed out into blankness. Those empty gray eyes stared at me.

  “Let go of me,” he said.

  I think it was his tone that made me blow my top. Suddenly I hated his guts. He didn’t give a damn about me. He didn’t care whether I lived or died. As far as he was concerned, I wasn’t even a dog. Nothing could touch him, the big-shot bastard. He still thought he was back in Spain, one of the top brass, and I was just an enlisted man. He was an officer and a gentleman.

  “You impotent son of a bitch,” I said.

  He just gave me the OCS direct stare that’s supposed to make you snap to attention.

  “You’re going to open the safe,” I said. “I’m going to twist your arm behind your back until you get down on your knees and open that safe. You’re going to crawl. Maybe there isn’t any past or any future, but there’s sure as hell a right now, and this is it. And you’re in it, whether you like it or not. A Count. Yeah. Your wife’s got more guts than you, you impotent old bastard.”

  His eyes didn’t change a bit. Neither did his face.

  I started to laugh. It wasn’t funny, but I wanted to laugh at him, and I felt like laughing at him.

  And then his face did change. The lips weren’t tight and hard any more. I felt him try to pull away from me, but I held him harder, helpless, and I kept on laughing, forcing it, because I saw that this was working.

  Then, all of a sudden, I realized that he wasn’t looking at me any more. He was looking at the gun muzzle. It wasn’t six inches away from his face, and he must have been looking right down it, right into the little black hole.

  Something like a flash passed over his face. It happened so fast I never understood what was happening. But whatever he saw down the gun barrel made him turn into somebody else, for just a second. It wasn’t just a gun barrel, either. It was the most horrible thing in the world that he was looking at.

  Then the flash passed over his face again, and he said, almost in a whisper, “Silvestre—presente!”

  The gun bucked. I don’t know if I heard the sound of the shot. But I saw his forehead disappear.

  I thought he fell slowly. My fingers had opened, but my elbows stayed bent, and my hands stuck out in front of me. I looked down at him, past my hands. There wasn’t a sound.

  Then I came to life. My head came to life. My eyes did. Because I felt people watching me. I jerked my head around to the left, and there was nothing there. Then to the right. Then I turned around. The room was empty. I looked down again at him.

  My eyes focused on my hands, stuck out in front of me, the fingers curled. I let my arms drop to my sides. But then my hands felt empty. They had to do something. They had to grab something, move something.

  I looked around again—short, quick glances. I saw the safe. That was it. My hands pulled me over there. I got down on one knee and started to turn the dial. But my left hand had nothing to do. I flattened it down on the rug. That was no good. It grabbed my shoe. It let go and tightened and unclosed on my leg. It kept doing that, while my right hand turned the dial back and forth. It was like a clock. All I had to do was turn the dial. The right number had to come up. It had to come up. It had to. But of course it didn’t. After a while I knew the safe wasn’t going to open, no matter how long I fiddled with a combination I didn’t know.

  My left hand was rubbing up and down my leg hard. Bent over this way, my stomach and my throat began to feel hollow. I thought I was going to vomit. There was too much blood in my head. I stood up quickly. I breathed deep.

  There was a vase on a table near me. I picked it up. I looked around. Whatever I was looking for, it wasn’t there. My gaze settled on the bare wall opposite me.

  I threw the vase at it as hard as I could.

  Maybe it was the vase that reminded me of Benita. I looked over at…him, and all of a sudden it hit me—the spot I was in. With Benita as a witness.

  The revolver was on the carpet. I picked it up. I don’t know what I intended to do. I wanted to see where I stood. I had to check up. I didn’t even know if there were any more bullets in the gun. But I had it in my hand when I started out toward the back.

  The closet door was wide open. So was the outside door. I got there fast. I started to run across the patio, then made myself stop and listen. There wasn’t a sound.

  I couldn’t see very well, even in the moonlight, after the lights inside the house. But I went out beyond the U of the patio, till I could see down the slope, looking for any sign of Benita. There wasn’t any sign.

  She might still be in the house, hiding. Or…

  I remembered the car. I hadn’t heard it start, but Benita might have her foot on the starter right now. I ran.

  The Chewy was there, and the key was in the ignition.

  I reached over and touched the steering wheel, and then it came to me—there wasn’t a thing to keep me from Sherry now.

  The money? I couldn’t get it. The safe was set in concrete, and there wasn’t a thing I could do about that. All I could do was get to Sherry now. There was nothing else left. Get her, and head for the Mexican border, before the police got after me. Benita—maybe I could catch up with her.

  By then I was backing the Chewy out, cramping the wheel hard to turn, gunning the motor and kicking up the driveway’s dust.

  All the way down I kept my eye open for Benita. But I didn’t spot her by the time I passed Walt Hamilton’s place. There was no light on there. Still, Benita could wake him up. He had a phone. I pushed the accelerator down harder.

  I’d have to get gas somewhere this side of Yuma, or Nogales.

  I wondered how Benita had got out. But there must have been some tool in the closet she’d used. Or maybe a hairpin. I didn’t know. It didn’t matter. I had the accelerator down to the floor, but it didn’t help a bit. The Chewy was too slow. My hands were aching. But I couldn’t ease up my grip on the wheel. There was a hot feeeling in my chest, boiling hot, trying to spread out, but being pushed back. I felt ready to explode. I kept holding my breath without noticing it and letting it out with a little grunt.

  The desert was all around me, the dry sea. My headlights made shafts through dark water. They showed me where I was going. The road showed me. But ahead there was a highway sign. A side road went off to the left. I started to feel scared. I had to decide. And I had to decide fast. I tried to let up on the accelerator, but I couldn’t. Where was I going, anyhow?

  Something made me look down. There on the seat beside me was the gun. Two of us together, the gun and I.

  The car roared past the highway sign and the side road and kept on straight ahead. I knew where we were going. We we
re going to Sherry.

  Chapter 19

  After a while I was in Phoenix. That surprised me. My mind had been turned off. I realized that I was in traffic, and jerked my foot off the accelerator, looking at the speedometer at the same time. But the needle pointed to twenty-five, exactly. I didn’t remember slowing down, and back on the highway I must have been pushing seventy.

  Then I did remember. I’d seen the speed-limit signs all right, and I’d obeyed each one. I’d even stopped at a couple of stop lights, now that I thought back. The minute I’d passed that side road; I knew where I was going. All I had to do was what the signs told me.

  I turned left, and pretty soon slowed down in front of Sherry’s apartment house. I didn’t stop. I’d spotted a drugstore across the street, at the end of the block, so I went on and parked near it. Then I slipped the revolver into my belt, where my coat would hang to cover it, and I got out of the car and headed for the drugstore.

  It was bright and shiny inside, everything new. Some night-owl high-school kids were at the fountain drinking Cokes. A woman was looking over the magazine rack. A man with gray hair was at the prescription counter, talking to the druggist. I spotted the phone booths at the back and walked that way, careful of my coat so nobody would see the revolver. On the way I passed a counter of toys, with some guns mixed up together—imitation Colts, cap pistols, and atom guns—and it made me think that the revolver in my belt was a toy gun too, that would just spout sparks if I squeezed the trigger. When I got to the phone booth, I stepped in and shut the door, but when I started to pick up the receiver, I couldn’t remember Sherry’s number. I looked out through the glass panels of the door. What I could see of the drugstore was clean and bright and somehow sunny. It made me think of the toy floor in a big department store, when I was a little kid. I don’t know why, but everything in the drugstore fitted together and made sense. Everything in it belonged. And it all made sense. That was the important thing. You took a cap gun and put a roll of caps in it and squeezed the trigger. That was all. It wasn’t a real gun. When you played cops and robbers, you pretended to be killed sometimes, if the cap gun was aimed at you when it went off. If you didn’t, you weren’t playing fair. But it wasn’t playing fair when you kept on lying there after the game was over—pretending to be dead when it was only a game.